If I were to ask, “What is Freedom?”, each of us would probably come up with a personal definition.  Our founding fathers would probably have defined Freedom as the absence of external coercion.  You notice that I said “external” coercion.  Our founders understood that moral character and righteousness were essential elements of self-governance.  While crafting a document that guaranteed the absence of external coercion, they demanded of themselves and expected of us the “internal coercion” that comes from a personal moral compass, a conscience.  The Constitution removed the external coercion that is necessarily part of an oppressive government.  The Constitutional Republic it defined can only endure over time if the citizens are governed by an internal morality that demands honesty, character, and charity in their interactions among themselves.

Without question, the disintegration of the moral basis for government is responsible for the progressive and relentless loss of our individual Liberties.  We are ruled, not governed, by a gang of interchangeable thieves and liars who sacrifice principle for political expediency and run for office for personal gain.  Our federal government disregards the Constitution, sacrifices individual liberties, and ignores citizens who demonstrate peacefully for a redress of grievances.

Now, we gather in groups and go to meetings to complain about legislation that steals our liberty and to condemn the greed and corruption that infests the halls of government.  We march in Washington to protest a federal bureaucracy in which faceless, unelected pencil pushers create and fund rules, regulations, and entitlement programs whose purpose is to buy the votes necessary to keep the incumbents in power.

Where were we when the intellectual elitists and their power-hungry progressive friends used subterfuge and lies to circumvent the principles of the Constitution in order to undermine the dignity and sanctity of the individual?  Where were we when they enacted legislation that permits our government to steal private property from one citizen and give it to another based on the deception called social justice?  And where were we when they turned “We the People” into the collective “We” instead of individual free citizens of a great nation?

In 1808, John Adams said, “When public virtue is gone, when the national spirit is fled . . the republic is lost in essence, though it may still exist in form.”

Sadly, our nation as it exists today, is a flimsy shroud that barely conceals the moral emptiness inside.  We can no longer claim to be the Constitutional Republic that our founders gave to us and that generations of proud Americans fought to protect.

While we closed our minds in a state of ignorance, men motivated by greed and a lust for power commandeered the ship of state.  While we satisfied our personal cravings for luxury and ease, the moral certainties of right and wrong became relative and elastic.  And while our current leaders reject the undeniable truth of American excellence, the spirit and sovereignty of our nation is purposely being eroded to achieve their global agenda.

The Constitution, my fellow citizens, has not failed us.

Rather it is we who have failed the Constitution.

I am very worried about the future of our nation.  I am worried that our children will not have the opportunity to prosper that we all had.

I am afraid that on some day like today twenty years from now, a man just like me will stand in front of a group like you and say, “And there arose in America a generation that knew not freedom.”

Is that slow descent from freedom to slavery acceptable to any of you?

That is why we must rekindle both in ourselves and in others a passion for the Constitution and the individual freedom that it guarantees to each of us.

That, my fellow patriots, is what I demand of you.

If our nation is to survive, each of you must become a missionary for the Constitution and for Liberty.  Tell the story of our nation to your family and to your neighbors.  Most importantly, teach your children and grandchildren about the greatness of America.  Talk to them about the Constitution and the men and women who sacrificed everything so that we can live in freedom.

Hold them in your arms and say to them, “This is the Constitution that Thomas Jefferson gave to me so that each citizen of our great nation can live in Freedom.  This is the Constitution that George Washington gave to me after I spent the winter with him in Valley Forge, after I crossed the icy Delaware River on Christmas eve and defeated General Cornwallis at Yorktown to win our freedom from tyranny and oppression.”

The price of our failure will be paid for by the slavery of future generations.

Dr. Dan Eichenbaum is a practicing ophthalmologist in Murphy, North Carolina, and a founder of the Cherokee County 9-12 Project. Visit his website at http://drdansfreedomforum.com/

Copyright 2010 Dan Eichenbaum

For a professor of law at one of the country’s best law schools who was once the go-to guy in the Justice Department whenever the Bush White House needed legal cover for its truly lawless ventures outside the Constitution, John Yoo has revealed a breathtaking ignorance of American values, history, and jurisprudence.

In his startling mea culpa, published in the Wall Street Journal recently, Professor Yoo confessed to advising President Bush that he possessed powers from some source other than the Constitution, that in the name of public safety he could cut down all laws written for the express purpose of restraining the President, and that Americans would expect no less than this so long as they were actually kept safe as a result of it.

He advanced the argument that since the President’s first job is to keep us safe, he could disregard the 1978 FISA law as “obsolete” since it was written in an era when modern day non-state terrorism was not contemplated. By this unprecedented and perverse logic, one wonders if the President was told if he could disregard as obsolete any law that was inconvenient to his purposes; even the Supreme Law of the Land itself, which the Constitution declares itself to be.

The whole purpose of FISA was to abolish the Nixonian notion that “If the President does it, it’s not illegal.” While FISA’s statutory reduction of the constitutionally-mandated standard for obtaining a judicial search warrant – from probable cause of crime to probable cause of foreign status – is itself of dubious constitutionality, nevertheless, it is and was at the time Professor Yoo was telling President Bush to disregard it, the “exclusive” lawful means for agents of the President to wiretap foreign persons present in the U.S. Moreover, the FISA court has become the President’s rubber stamp by granting well over 99% of requested warrants.

It is not painless for one who loathes this law to defend it; but it was among the laws that the President and the Professor swore to uphold, it does force the executive branch to identify and specify who and what it wishes to pursue, and it presents at least a minimum of checking and balancing by forcing the President to go before a super-secret court (without an adversary present) and seek permission to violate the Fourth Amendment-guaranteed rights of the President’s targets.

The time-is-of-the essence argument is nonsense. I once issued a search warrant in my gym shorts from my living room at 3 am, and I know of a former FISA court judge who did the same from his cell phone while riding a motorcycle. While neither of these situations is optimal, there are at least written records of what was done to whom and why; and that was a goal of the law which President Bush was told was obsolete.

The Framers never contemplated FISA, and I cannot conceive of Jefferson, Madison, or even Hamilton condoning it. But one thing we know the Framers would never condone is a government that refused to reside within the Constitution; “chained down” by it as Jefferson once said.

The Founders, unlike John Yoo and George Bush, feared a king who enforced only the laws he found convenient to his present needs, who dispatched his agents with their own self-generated search warrants to knock on any door and seize any thing they or the king wanted, and who claimed to be doing all this for safety’s sake.

Cutting down the laws to get at the Devil is dangerous business. As Robert Bolt argued in A Man for All Seasons, the land is planted thick with laws. If you cut them down to get to the Devil, who could stand the wind that then would blow?

When President Lincoln and the Radical Republicans tried civilians in military tribunals in the North, hundreds of miles from battle, and in the South after the Civil War had ended, a unanimous Supreme Court stopped them. It declared that “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.”

President Bush argued frequently and forcefully that his first job was to keep us safe. He was wrong. The Constitution tells us that his sole job was to enforce the Constitution; and that means keeping us free. Free from tyrants who sought and claimed power from thin air; free from prince-like federal agents who could behave without constitutional or legal restraint; free to live with a government that obeyed its own laws. Any president who keeps us safe but unfree is rejecting his oath to the American people.

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], who was on the bench of the Superior Court of New Jersey between 1987 and 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His newest book is Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, (Nelson, 2009) His previous books are A Nation of Sheep, The Constitution in Exile and Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws.

Copyright © 2009 Andrew P. Napolitano

The Founders were aware that, as is true of any legal document, the Constitution’s application to new cases sometimes would not be obvious, and the instrument would have to be interpreted. The Founders expected future interpreters to resort to the “meaning of the makers.”

One way to help determine the “meaning of the makers” was to employ long-standing guidelines for legal interpretation – called “rules of construction.” The rules of construction were considered to be of very great authority.

Perhaps 90 percent of them were stated in Latin, with the rest in English or Norman French. Many, if not most, of them are still used by lawyers and judges today when they interpret legal documents.

One particularly important rule of construction was Designatio unius est exclusio alterius – “the naming of one thing implies the exclusion of the other.”  Example:  If your spouse tells you to go to the grocery store and buy “cucumber, lettuce, milk, and eggs,” he or she probably is NOT suggesting that you buy cheese.

The Constitution listed over 30 powers of Congress. But the Constitution’s advocates pointed out that the designatio unius maxim made the list exclusive: Congress would have no powers not on the list.

To quiet fear from the Constitution’s opponents that the designatio unius rule might be disregarded, both sides agreed to adopt the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Thus, Congress was given various listed powers – such as authority to regulate commerce, to tax, to coin money, and to govern the federal territories and enclaves (such as D.C). But otherwise, Congress received no authority to control education, manufacturing, agriculture or a lot of other things Congress that presumes to control today.

Robert G. Natelson is Professor of Constitutional Law, Legal History, Advanced Constitutional Law, and a seminar on the First Amendment at the University of Montana.  He is a David Mason Scholar, and is a recognized national expert on the framing and adoption of the United States Constitution.  He edits the website, The Scholarship of the Original Understanding of the Constitution.

The framers of the Constitution attempted to balance the power of the President as commander-in-chief with that of Congress, the representatives of the People. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution gives to the Executive Branch the command of the nation’s armed forces, while Article I, Section 8 gives to the Legislative Branch the power to decide when the United States goes to war. They weighed the individual will of the Executive against the deliberative function of the Legislature, whose constituents would bear the full costs of any war.

Thus, the framers deliberately separated the powers of declaring and waging war; they confined these powers in such a way so as to thwart the tyranny of kings. Despite being known as one of the greatest champions of centralized power of the times, even Alexander Hamilton felt that the President must generally bow to Congressional directions in times of peace and also in times of war. He stated this clearly in Federalist #69:

“The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect, his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces.; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies – all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.”

Our nation’s founders were far from perfect, and at times, inconsistent and unjust; but, on the powers of war, they were unwavering, and their principles were sound. Therefore, we must also consider the following statements:

“The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.”
- James Madison

“This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large: this declaration must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives: from this circumstance we may draw a certain conclusion that nothing but our interest can draw us into war.”
- James Wilson

“Considering that Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war, I have thought it my duty to await their authority for using force in any degree which could be avoided.”
- Thomas Jefferson

“The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature”
- James Madison

The founders were absolutely clear in their demand that the country would only go to war upon the collective decision of the representatives of the People. Additionally, a primary reason for creating a system of representation was due to exigencies of the day that made it impossible for the People to meet and decide their fate in person. Thus, the true reason for entrusting the Legislature with the power to declare war was to ensure that the People would be involved in the decision as much as was physically possible.

What the Framers did not imagine was a weak and ineffectual Congress that failed to claim its rightful authority in deciding when the nation would go to war, or a power-hungry President that wouldn’t refuse an extra-constitutional transfer of such power from Congress.

The typical statist response to this argument is to claim that previous Presidents have sent troops into battle “hundreds of times” without a Congressional declaration of war. Thus, the favorite Presidential excuse for claiming the right to initiate war unilaterally is nothing more than the reasoning of a child: Everybody does it.

But, the Constitution remains valid even after Presidents violate it.

We must hold that thought; a transfer of power is a violation of the Constitution by both the President, who accepts the transfer, as well as those in Congress who vote to delegate their Constitutionally-mandated responsibility to another branch. In recent decades, such transfers have ultimately been no more than a blank check for the President.

It has been known throughout history that kings, dictators, and the executive branch of governments are always overly eager to go to war. This is precisely why our founders tried desperately to keep decisions about going to war in the hands of the Legislature, and close to the People. Unfortunately this process has failed us for decades.

Therefore, one obvious reason for dividing the war powers was to prevent such dictatorial powers from being placed in the hands of one person, the President. The framers understood that, throughout history, rulers of nations worldwide had begun wars strictly on the basis of international politics or personal desires.

They clearly understood that rulers would often get the urge to remove foreign public officials, or dictate the policies of foreign nations, and that such urges are dangerous to liberty, no matter what the reason. Sometimes they would do this by sending money to opposing groups with taxpayer money, and sometimes they would do so by assassination or coup.

But, history has proven to us that when all else fails, such despotic leaders will ultimately resort to invasion; as President Bush and his son did with Iraq; as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did with Vietnam; as President Clinton did with Yugoslavia; as President Truman did with Korea; and as other Presidents did with less fanfare but similar vigor.

Another reason for entrusting the Congress with the power to declare war was in the hope that this would ensure, as much as possible, that a war was justified. Thus, the idea was that if a President desired to send the nation into war, an appeal to the People, through their representatives, would be required to convince them of the justification for war. Although our experience has shown that they failed, the framers desperately tried to minimize the potential for political entanglements in foreign affairs by dividing the war powers between the President and the Congress.

Why was all this so important to the framers? Because they wisely feared dictatorial powers; even in the hands of an elected leader. They also recognized that, of all potential enemies to liberty, war is the worst because it provides the greatest opportunity for the government to infringe on our rights! As James Madison suggested:

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We must now recognize that the millions of dead in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the current quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, all result from the same defective policy of ignoring our laws as codified in the Constitution; all result from the same faulty foreign policy of American interventionism that our government has pursued for more than a century. It would be overly simplistic, and completely erroneous, to say that the current administration is alone responsible for such actions and our current wars. This is an endemic problem in our system of governance that crosses party lines, and has infected nearly every person who is involved in the administration of our government’s foreign policy.

By rejecting the advice and the rules laid down by the founders and early Presidents, our recent leaders have gone so far astray from warnings against entangling alliances, that the founders would hardly recognize the government they created. Policing the world and “spreading democracy” is not our calling. Additionally, no such action is permitted by the Constitution.

These concepts are the key to solving our problems. If we don’t want our delegated rulers to violate the contract they have sworn to uphold; if we don’t want blank checks drawn indefinitely on the public liberty and on civil society, we must strive to have our politicians follow the law that governs the government – the Constitution.

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose; and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you, ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’”
- Abraham Lincoln